I hate the term “normalization” because it doesn’t mean anything to most people. The closest approximation of it’s meaning to most people is “stuff (usually negative) is happening”.
Please point me to the time in American history where it was normal to:
- pay taxes for everyone’s health care
- follow international law
- not do extrajudicial killings/imprisonment
- not be personally or institutionally racist
Spoiler you cannot. These times literally do not exist in any meaningful way, they only exist as ephemeral pockets of modernity that you personally have experienced. Many of the arguments that you can make in favor of these points of time, suffer greatly from the just world fallacy. When you look a little too hard at those pockets of time, you’ll find that your feeling was just a feeling and it wasn’t even true.
This meme may be good at convincing libs their world view is fucked, but it’s not an accurate depiction.
I kind of look at normalization in terms of the Overton window, as in what topics are up for debate politically. I completely agree that there is always a gap between how a society sees itself and how it actually behaves, but I would argue that the stage where a society starts to openly embrace its crimes is the one to be really worried about.
This still doesn’t make any sense:
pay taxes for everyone’s health care
This was never up for debate until let’s say 2003 when Conyers introduced medicare for all. Then it was up for debate in pockets of years, and it really matters specifically what you mean by who’s debating in that window. Politicians or news media.
So roughly these are the open Overton windows for universal healthcare
follow international law
This was never really up for debate until 2001. The US simply just broke international law when it saw fit prior, and after.
not do extrajudicial killings/imprisonment
This is essentially the same as above. See our various policing actions in the modern era. MOVE, Japanese Internment, Mexican “Repatriation”. Lynchings. Pinkertons. No real debate to be had here, America just does it and then does paperwork to justify it.
not be personally or institutionally racist
This has essentially been debated since the start of the US. So it’s been “in the window”. But in practice the position has always been right wing even to this day.
I would argue that the stage where a society starts to openly embrace its crimes is the one to be really worried about.
Open embrace of crimes is worrying sure, but in practice it’s not practically better than doing crimes, denying you do them, and pretending you’re good. Because in reality, what you can see on the left as “open embrace of criminality” on the right is seen as “being the good guys”. So the open embrace may qualify as an increase in magnitude but not a change in direction.
This also pretends that the causes of these shifts are not a change in material realities, but rather a change in attitudes ex nihilio. When every empire thinks its fading it does this kinda shit, because this is the kind of shit that builds and maintains empires. It’s not because the “bad guys” are in charge.
Don’t forget the material basis for these shifts! While The Discourse of “practical” truangulating centrists tends to show this rightward path, it is because (1) they were already fundamentally reactionary, they tend to just use this logic as an excuse for why they tolerate far-right positions, and (2) the right is supported by the ruling class to address some of the “problems” it creates, like a marginalized underclass that wants enough income to feed their children, housing, and safety from violence.
The shift right is not driven simply by debate or ideology, but by the arenas where degradation in material conditions due to capitalism meet the ruling class’ need to deflect blame to the marginalized (who they can reap larger profits from) to placate the less marginalized. Racism, nationalism, and extermination campaigns are created and maintained for the interests of capital, with the common people being pushed and prodded to fall in line with repeating the (usually ad hoc) new or recycled scapegoats and underclassrs. Wouldn’t want you to point blame in the right direction!
💯
Yep, this is a huge fucking problem.
Top bad the often proposed suggestion of “let’s just skip right to the end” isn’t actually a solution.
Thank you.
Real sick of this argument right now. Just letting the right win because the left-most party is too willing to compromise isn’t a moral victory.
The criticisms of the dem party don’t amount to “let the right win”, they amount to “the DNC prevents any political resistance to the right, they either need to be coup’d or destroyed if we want to stop the right from winning”
This is not how I have understood the criticisms being thrown around Lemmy lately, but I appreciate the perspective. Even so, I’m not sure I can agree that the best solution to dealing with the right is to fight the centrists first, but I can at least appreciate your point in the specific context of the current two-party system.
fight the centrists
Centrists are literally the people that often have the majority of backing from the very people and institutions that allow these problems to fester and grow. Their solutions are often the most unworkable in the real world and their outcomes are often right leaning simply because of how politics works in capitalist societies. Centrists have power in our political system not because of brokering any good compromise, it’s because Centrists are often the best fundraisers because they can appeal to a wide array of rich donors.
It’s a silly take if you think Centrists can be allies to any semblance of Left. The Kamala Harris campaign is literal proof of it. Raise $1.1B, spend $1.120B on literal Centrist trash positions and political strategy like paying celebrities and sending Richie Torres to Michigan, while telling everyone how you’re the smartest people in the room.
The most celebrated Centrist policy of the 20th century is the ACA (note all the other ones that were celebrated before it are not so much celebrated now because of what they actually did see NAFTA, TANF, etc). The only “left” positions in the ACA is 100% coverage of preventative medicine, mandatory contraception coverage, and making preexisting conditions an illegal qualification. In reality the real mark of the ACA is that instead of going bankrupt for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in medical debt, Americans are going broke for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical debt. It’s literally a debt regulation that keeps private healthcare a viable and profitable system because the game of musical chairs that is our healthcare debt system was running out of chairs. 10% of Americans owe medical debt, thanks to the ACA it’s thousands to hundreds of thousands, if it wasn’t for the ACA it would be 10x larger.
Who had the most benefit from that policy? It certainly wasn’t people, who still struggle to pay for healthcare, still carry medical debt, and still are going bankrupt. It was the corporations who could continue this extractive grift because the government essentially brokered a deal between the entire market to reset the scale of the economy and no one corporation felt like it was losing out compared to the others.
You can even look at the majority of legal opposition to the ACA isn’t based in it’s left positions. For contraception you have Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania. That’s it for opposition to the left positions, the rest is about how the market is regulated under ACA:
- National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and other lawsuits were about the individual mandate, which was effectively ruled a tax.
- King v. Burwell was about using federal subsidies in states without exchanges
- House v. Price was about cost sharing and transfer payments between insurers
- United States House of Representatives v. Azar was about cost sharing reducation payments and how they were allocated in the budget
- California v. Texas was again about the individual mandate as a tax
- Maine Community Health Options v. United States was about risk corridor payments and appropriation.
Where is the opposition to the left here? It’s not really there, because there’s not a lot of “left” policy. This is centrist infighting about who has to hold the bag for this fucked up system that extracts money from people’s health.
That’s what centrism is, market brokerage.
Even so, I’m not sure I can agree that the best solution to dealing with the right is to fight the centrists first
We aren’t able to use electoralism to fight the right as long as the political platform and messaging of the democratic party is 95% the same as the republican’s.
We need ranked choice voting so people can vote for who they actually want without throwing away they vote. The problem is opposing ranked choice voting is one of very few issues both parties agree on, since it hurts both of them.
The sad thing is that it works both ways. If a left party in government is improving things but had to do a compromise and therefore couldn’t go all the way the far left is also complaining about that.
Compromise with far right positions should never happen, but compromise in itself is not something bad, and imho it’s one of the main problems in today’s democracy that too many people see it that way.
As with almost all things: it’s good to have principles to stand by, but the world is rarely as black and white as it seems to be.
This is a bad faith meme that represents anyone making any form of compromise as a rude, close-minded, genocide supporter, posted by an account that frequently posts pro-China, sometimes pro-Russia propaganda, and hops between Western country-focused lemmy’s pending election cycles.
Just making sure the context for this post is visible.
This is a bad faith meme that represents anyone making any form of compromise as a rude
They’re not depicted as rude, they’re depicted as an know-it-all eager compromiser that ends up working for the forces of reaction because they have no real principles or red lines.
close-minded
That is generally the attitude of “centrists” and people that go out of the way to congratulate themselves on “being practical” by triamgulating. If they were open to actual principles they eould no longer be triangulating on them, and triangulating is their primary commitment.
genocide supporter
Like virtually every Democratic member of Congress and both of their presidential candidates? Anyone tolerating that is indeed complicit. It does not require any mental gymnastics to acknowledge this.
posted by an account that frequently posts pro-China
No!!! I almost passed out when I read that. You’re telling me there are good aspects of a designated enemy of empire!? Impossible.
Open-minded btw.
sometimes pro-Russia propaganda
Not another designated enemy!!! I almost died when I read this.
and hops between Western country-focused lemmy’s pending election cycles.
Is this supposed to imply something bad about them?
The only moral stance is to post about the US election in lemmydotEthiopia, the Australian election in lemmydotSuriname, the Bolivian election in LemmydotAlbania, and so on, but only if it’s months out of sync. Anything else is suspicious.
And here I thought statements of lemmy.ml being overrun with tankies were exaggurated. Boy your deconstruction of my post sure showed me!
Tell me about it. When I first learned that the website developed and run by Communists had Communists on it, I couldn’t believe what was happening.
People elect representatives to represent them, not to compromise and pass the opposition’s agenda.
It’s forgivable if the representative failed to obtain enough power, but if they have literally any means at their disposal and don’t use it, an unwillingness to use all the power the people gave them to do what they elected them to do is a betrayal of those people.
